OMT is excited to announce that, after many months of very hard work by Terry Lott, OMT, and our friends at the Specify Project in Kansas, the Genetic Resources Repository (GRR) is live on Specify.  The GRR soft launch was at the beginning of the summer and all database activity has been conducted solely in Specify since early June!

The GRR is the Museum’s ninth collection to go live on Specify, joining the ranks of Invertebrate Paleontology, Ichthyology, Mammalogy, Herpetology, Invertebrate Zoology, Paleobotany, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Ornithology.

The GRR migration posed exciting challenges, most importantly, the opportunity to dramatically simplify the flow of data from ranges into the GRR and to elevate the quality of GRR data.

The GRR is a unique collection within the Museum.  It receives, catalogs, and stores tissue samples from our other biological collections and, as such, contains data referencing other collections’ specimens.  This has historically posed a problem for the Museum in that there was no mechanism for tissue metadata to update in sync with the donor database.  The GRR perpetually reflected only the metadata as it was at the time of tissue contribution regardless of taxonomic and GIS updates to the specimen.  Now that GRR is live on Specify, we have a common data model and platform and can fix this problem.

Thanks to great collaboration with Invertebrate Zoology, Fishes, Birds, Mammals, and Herpetology, OMT has designed a solution for the data from the contributing collections to automatically synchronize and update the GRR.  The end result is, for the first time in Museum history, the GRR will automatically stay in sync and return results consistent with the contributing database!

OMT is currently implementing this synchronization range by range, as the exact fields for synchronization differ greatly in each case. Mammals synchronization is on track for general release by the middle of September, followed by Birds, Invertebrate Zoology, and Fishes in quick succession.

Once synchronization for all ranges is in general release, the GRR public web portal will be published and announced.